Playing Fallout New Vegas as a vegetarian

Well, I took the plunge last night and went vegetarian. Well, okay, I went vegetarian in Fallout New Vegas (it sounds more fun than going vegetarian in real life). I cheated and add the Animal Friend perk at the start (otherwise it'd be some stupid "run from hostile animals and have someone else kill them" and that doesn't sound fun), but the perk annoying doesn't include insects like the giant ants and all that. I figure they're technically not animals so it's okay, I just won't kill any that aren't hostile and I won't loot anything from them. It was going really well up until one of my shotgun pellets hit a Legion Dog and made it hostile.

I'm basically role-playing it as a stereo-typical Oregonian, since, why not? My rule set is as follows:

Vegetarian but not Vegan. (Vegan really wouldn't be much harder though, since few foods use animal products in New Vegas)

Not anti-establishment, but not pro-establishment. I.E. I won't attack the NCR, but I won't go out of my way to help them either. I'll basically only attack the things that are hostile, and I won't attack anything that's not known to be hostile. So no shooting those people I meta-knowledge know to be raiders but character wise shouldn't know to be raiders.

No stealing at all. It's annoying when it's good karma to kill an escaped convict and okay to loot his body, but it's bad karma to steal something from his "house." At any rate, no stealing; stealing is wrong.

Hardcore mode so eating actually matters.

Hard difficulty. I find this the best setting since enemy weapons do a lot of damage but your own still do damage as well.

No fast traveling since that makes any Fallout and any Elder Scrolls game instantly better. When a quest sends you half way across the map it actually feels like a quest. Fast traveling is easily the worst part of Skyrim, but that's for another blog post.

No Nukacola (even to loot and sell). Nukacola is a representation of a giant corporation and Oregonians seem to support the little guy (in this case, Sunset Sarsaparilla) rather than the mega-corp. It's worth mentioning that Portland Oregon has more craft breweries inside its limits than any city in the world (http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220319) and, as such, I can pick up a fancy micro-brew for little more than most people pay for national brand brews. On tap at bars, it's often a very minimal cost difference between something like PBR and a Widmer Brother's Hefeweizen. Now remember from Fallout 3 that Nukacola Quantum had some bad test problems and the family of any people who died in test groups got a fruit basket as a sorry; this paints Nukacola as a uncaring and large corporation. Sunset Sarsaparilla is painted as a much smaller company in Fallout New Vegas (they aren't even national). Put these together and you'll hopefully see why my stereo-typical Oregonian will shun the big corp and embrace the (at least comparatively) little guy.


No over-bartering things. I'll still loot and sell things, but I won't do it too much. This plays better with the next (and final) rule. This is mostly done to make the game a bit tougher (but not as hard as my "no bartering" masochist mode rule set) rather than for role-playing.

Max caps is 1,000 times character level. So I can't ever get mega-rich, but I won't be as broke as I am in my "no bartering" masochist mode playthrough. I'm tempted to lower this to 500 caps times level to keep money even lower. Once I reach the limit, I won't be looting any more stuff I don't need. Keeping weapons and armor in repair will also keep me from getting too much money.


Like any good PC Fallout NV player, I have a crap-ton of mods installed. Most of these mods are weapon and ammo based so that there is a massive level of verity in enemy weapons and all that. And pretty much every weapon mod ever puts those new guns somewhere in Doc's house. As a result, I limit myself to only picking up a few of these guns whenever I start a new game. This time around I limited myself to 3 guns. The Tokarev (TT-30) fits very well as a cheap pistol that I'd expect an Oregonian to own (hell, I know at least 2 people who do). It's not expensive and flashy, it's reliable and cheap. If you've ever wondered why you see so many old Toyota's, Subaru's, and Volvo's on Oregon roads, this is the reason (along with the weather and crappy roads). All of the guns I picked follow this route. Second up was an Ithica M37 shotgun (in 20 gauge) with the side paddle shell holder installed. And lastly is an SKS (annoyingly in 5.56mm even though there are mods that add 7.62x39mm to the game). I used console commands to lower the reliability of all these weapons (I just pulled a random number out of my head, but they were all between 60% and 75% repaired), and all of them have the ability to jam when shooting, not just when reloading (one of my favorite things ever, since having a rifle jam in a fire fight really makes for a rush of adrenalin). I dumped anything else that wasn't these 3 weapons from my inventory, along with all the armors but the Armored Vault 13 suit, and then ditched the vault 13 canteen to make sure I had to worry about water.

I'm excited for this playthrough, but I'm afraid I'll have the same problem with it that I have with the masochist mode playthrough; I have no interest in aligning myself with factions and moving the story along, I just want to explore the wasteland. This is made worse in this playthrough since none of the factions really match with the type of character I'm playing as. And with no real end goal to aim for, it's tough to play the game for too long. I'll likely just play until my first death and call it done.

Bioshock (game worlds)

I'll start this by saying I've not beaten all of the first Bioshock (the lack of Steam cloud saving is a pain. I've played the first half or so of the game more times than I can count because I never back up my saves) but I've still played it. I've also not played any if Bioshock 2 or Infinite, but I do plan to play Infinite at some point (after beating 1).

I'd normally just Tweet this, since it's not a huge post like I normally do, but it's a bit too big for a Tweet. Today we have Bioshock: Infinite DLC announced and one of the packs takes place in Rapture before it all went to shit! I'm really excited for this, but not for the reasons people would probably expect. Bioshock's Rapture is a beautiful city and an interesting idea, but it feels so empty and 2D. It's like an amusement park ride or a cheesy western town. If you move along the route and don't look too hard you'll enjoy it, but the second you look deep you see that's it not a real place where people have ever lived. I never (and again I haven't beaten Bioshock 1 but I've played a decent amount of it) ever felt like people lived in Rapture. The areas flow badly and don't feel like I'm in a place anyone would build let alone live in. I'm sure some of this is because the game doesn't let you explore everywhere and does things to force you along a set route (so you're not moving through the city like a normal person would, you're instead going through broken walls and maintenance doors). When you add in the fact it's underwater you see it doesn't make any sense to have the buildings not designed perfectly before building. It's sad that I've felt like some Call of Duty maps could have actually been filled with people before a war and not in Bioshock (CoD has the advantage of being able to just copy real world areas or movie scenes though). I compare the two games because they're both hallway shooters (Bioshock is better at making you think it's not, but it's pretty damn linear) even if Bioshock likes to throw in RPG type things into the mix (though, once again, it's mostly normal shooter type things with an RPG paint job. In CoD you'd put on a red dot and you're gun would become more accurate where in Bioshock you'd upgrade it or equip plasmids). Borderlands is an example of an FPS/RPG hybrid with a close to a  50/50 split of the two). So the reason I'm excited for this DLC in Rapture is because I'm excited to see if Rapture can feel more like a real place if it's got people living in it rather than just enemies. I've not played Infinite, but from screen shots and in game video it doesn't often look like it'd feel like a real place with people in it. I do feel like Infinite starts out feeling like a real city (the fair parts at the start I've seen feel like a real place) but I won't know for sure until I play it; and the price (along with that damn Steam backlog) keeps that from happening anytime soon. Most games fall very short of making it seem like people could or do live in it, but few games ever really try for this either (by which I mean that they don't set out to simulate a real world, they set out to make a game, then throw in NPCs to make it sort of feel like a real place). Skyrim, Fallout 3 and NV, Borderlands, Final Fantasy, Pokemon; they all fall short of making me feel like I'm in a real place where people live, I'm hopeful that this DLC will finally make it feel like you're in a real place. I could go into detail about what I feel each of those games is lacking to make it feel like a real place with real people, but that would make this post a bit too long (and I'm too lazy to type that much).

The 2 games I can think of that do a decent job of making a city feel real are Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Detroit feels like a hell hole, but it mostly feels like a real hell hole. And China feels like a real slum without being over the top. The fact you can enter a lot of houses and apartments that you don't need to go into really helps this) and Assassin's Creed 2 (lots of people in the world and lots of places to go to. You can't enter house like in DE:HR but it makes sense that you wouldn't in AC2. The advantage here is that the developer can just use real world pictures/paintings/maps to make the city so it's easier to make it feel like a real place just throwing a shit-ton of NPCs into). You could also add GTA4 to this list, since it does a good job making an entire city feel pretty lively. I've not played enough of GTA4 to really have much of an opinion on it though so I won't (and, yes, you could say the same about me and Bioshock: Infinite. The point of this post is more Rapture across the games than it is about a particular game). Hopefully the next Fallout game can make the world seem like there are real civilizations built from the ashes of atomic hellfire, since one of the best parts of post-apocalyptic media are the people who climb back into the ruins of the world.